I have just returned from SVG Open which this year took place in Nuremberg, Germany, hosted by Examotion. I gave two presentations, one on my work on rendering and editing SVG using Flash, and another on model-based design.

With the demise of the Adobe SVG viewer plugin, there is a need for a new way to deploy SVG across existing browsers. Firefox, Opera and Safari now include native implementations, but Microsoft is keeping quiet on whether it will eventually add support for SVG in Internet Explorer. In the absence of native support, one possibility is to use browser sniffing and convert SVG to Microsoft’s proprietary VML format for delivery to Internet Explorer. VML isn’t as powerful as SVG, so that can cause problems. Another idea is to use a plugin, such as the former Adobe SVG viewer. Unfortunately, most users are very averse to downloading and installing new plugins.

The good news is that pretty much everyone already has the Adobe Flash player according to Adobe’s statistics. Flash has good support for XML, HTTP and graphics, and this suggests the possibility of using Flash to download and render SVG on any Flash enabled browser. I have been working to realize this idea.

My SVGOpen paper and presentation describe a viewer and associated editor that is designed to allow users to create and edit SVG directly on a website from within their browser. Thanks to Flash, this works on all major browsers and operating systems. Traditional drawing tools are standalone applications that need to be locally installed. The user interface is often very flexible and can be a little hard to learn. By contrast, most people expect Web applications to be easy to drive and something you can use the first time you come across it. Fulfilling such high expectations for an SVG editor isn’t going to be easy, but the work is progressing well and I am looking forward to initial user trials.